How to track Outlook email leads and Mobile calls with Google Tag Manager

I was planning to write this post for GTM v1 but decided to go for Google Tag Manager V2 instead knowing that most of you already migrate or will need to do so at some point in the very near future. I haven’t personally implemented a whole profile on V2 (I am about to do this next week and will write a relevant post about auto-migration) so any mistakes you spot please do let me know and I will edit accordingly.

Before diving into tagging and how to add value to various website elements when you are dealing with clients that do not have an e-commerce shop (or sometimes not an obvious onsite action that can be measured as a goal), a couple of words about auto-event tracking and what it means for marketers.

Auto-event tracking

Auto-event tracking was the most exciting news in GTM V.1 since it solved most marketers’ problems allowing micro and macro conversions tracking without having to nudge the web development team through the events report in GA. In the past if you wanted to track an event in your Google analytics dashboard such as pdf download, a CTA click, a form submission etc you had to manually add an on-click tracker to the element you wish to record (for example: onclick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Event Category’, ‘Event Action’)”.

Auto-event listener is what the word describes, it listens various events that happens on your web site (based on rules and macros) and then records them in analytics. For this to happen in version 1 you had to create a Click or a Link Click listener (if you were after link clicks) and a Google analytic events tag for tracking different link clicks.

In version 2, tag rules are now called “Triggers”. It is important to understand the difference between version 1 and 2 because now you control when your tag fires as well as when the auto-event listener should be active. Cool huh?

Let see how to create email and call clicks from your web site

In order to create one you need to click “Triggers” on the left hand side and select “new”. Then from the list select “Click”, and from the drop down menu you can define if you want this to be a click listener or a link click listener.

Select “link click”, click “Continue” and on the “Enable URL” when “Page URL matchesRegex add “.*” which by default is All pages” to make sure that the trigger will fire across your whole web site. Now that you have saved the trigger it is time to create your email and phone call tag. Let’s start with the Email one.

Tracking Outlook Email Goals with GTM

Firstly to clarify, when we say Email enquirers we mean people who will choose to click on your email URL instead of using the form. In all cases the code on your web site will be mailto:example@example.com

For this to happen you need to create an Email Click listener. Go to “Trigger” and select “Create New” then “Custom Event” type. Once you do that add on Event name “gtm.linkClick” and on conditions select “element url” containts “maillto”.

Once you are done save the trigger and go to the tags section. Click on “Tag” and from the drop down list select “Google Analytics”

Select “Universal” or “Classic”, depending what you are using and after adding your Google Analytics property ID, select “Event”. Once you do that add “Email click” on the Category field then select {{url}} on Action and {{element url}} on Label. Leave Field name on “Value” and anonymizeIp at “false”.

Then go to step 4 “Fire on” and click more. You will now see a list of all your triggers. Select the one called “Email click” and then save your tag.

Now you will do the same exercise for tracking mobile phone clicks. Basically, all you need to do is follow the same procedure with the addition of a new trigger for mobile phones. Similar to the email trigger, most mobile phones are under the code “tel:”. Create the same trigger with email but replace “mailto” with “tel” in the element URL field as shown below.

Go create a new Google Analytics event tag but this time use “Phonecall Clicks” in the category, and {{URL}} on Action, {{element URL}} on Label. Click on the firing rules and select mobile phone. Save the tag and publish your container.

You should now start seeing data in your Google Analytics reports each time someone clicks on your phone number or decides to send an email via your mailto link.

Make sure you create goals around your events so you can track channel performance and also dont hesitate to assign goal value in order to see which pages are driving this activity. Note that on the graph below you on the “label” field you can add the whole email address like this “mailto:example@website.com”

About YiannisG

Yiannis has twelve years experience working in digital marketing and was an early enthusiast and adopter of web analytics. He is currently working as a senior digital analyst and has held different positions at various companies such as Tesco, Gain Capital, City Index, Art Division, Middlesex University, Ford, Honda to name a few. He has also worked as a consultant for various private firms and digital agencies, primarily for web analytics and biddable media set up & optimisation. In his spare time he is working on various SEO projects - but in reality he is trying to outwit Google.